Steven L Acker

I am a lifelong student of the Civil War, with a degree in history. I have studied the time period as a reenactor and as a historian. The historian perspective has given me a deep understanding of the historical world the novels takes place in. Reading the original letters, studying the tactics, and understanding the nuances of the various battles described within the novels all come about from exhaustive study. For me, life is a series of gritty events threaded together by the twine of human motivations, behaviors, and emotions. The characters in my books, I hope, live along that line. The characters have to feel real. The same goes for history. The twine binding history follows the same human motivations, behaviors, and emotions. But to portray a historical fiction piece properly, I have to get the history right. From a battle time line to a ration issue, to the proper orders for a military movement, the history has to be right in order for the story to feel authentic-feel real. Civil War reenacting has given me the experience of living on salt pork, the weight of the knapsack tugging at my shoulders while on a long march, the intimacy of opening my eyes to an embered fire and a cold morning, and more. But my books are not about war. They are about people in war. The human experience. The human cost. The human glory and failure. It is the characters, they are why I write.

I have crossed fence and field trying to marry history to fiction. I hope you, the reader, find value in my writings.